Radio Book Club Book Mentions

The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river. In the winter of 1983, the largest El Niño event on record — a chain of “superstorms” that swept in from the Pacific Ocean — battered the entire West. That spring, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam, a 710-foot-high wall of concrete that sat at the head of the most iconic landscape...

A mother and midwife inadvertently threatens the fortunes and livelihoods of her family and their neighbors after noticing an increase in local miscarriages and believes it's caused by the pesticides used by the Sanderson Timber Company, her husband's employer.

"The ... author of The Happiness Project discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity, and love: by tuning in to the five senses. For more than a decade, Gretchen Rubin had been studying happiness and human nature. Then, one day, a visit to her eye doctor made her realize that she'd been overlooking a key element of happiness: her five senses. She'd spent so much time stuck in her head that she'd allowed the vital sensations of...

"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, a mesmerizing story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's...

"In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles in the back pages of her exercise book, thrilling to the first sparks of her own inventiveness. As she grows, she becomes one on whom nothing is lost. Not the novels an eccentric customer slips her at the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, or the indelible outline of the careening creature himself. Not the growing heaps of books in which she loses--and finds--herself....

Path of Light treks back through time as author and explorer Morgan Sjogren retraces the 1920s expeditions led by Charles L. Bernheimer into the heart of Glen Canyon and Bears Ears National Monument. Mindful of the pervasive effects of colonization and motivated by a deeply personal care for the land, Sjogren asks what it means to be an explorer while learning from the people who have loved the land for millennia and moments. Path of Light walks...

"In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native S�ami reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivv�ar, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse's daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something...

An explosive tale of art and myth, desire and betrayal, from New York Times best-selling author Jill BialoskySomething terrible has happened and I don't know what to do. An unnamed narrator's life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at

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"Author, illustrator, and translator Deena Mohamed presents a literary, feminist, Arab-centric graphic novel that marries magic and the socio-political realities of contemporary Egypt. Shubeik Lubeik--a fairytale rhyme meaning 'Your Wish is My Command' in Arabic--is the story of three characters navigating a world where wishes are literally for sale; mired in bureaucracy and the familiar prejudices of our world, the more expensive the wish, the more...